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Find journals : Info for chemists and chemical engineers

This guide includes the following topics: finding journals at Stanford, and requesting a copy of an article that is not available at Stanford. It also has information about journal abbreviations, DOIs (digital object identifiers), evaluating journals, full-text searching, and titles covered in selected databases.

Table of Contents

Finding journals at Stanford

Use SearchWorks, Stanford’s Library Catalog, to find journal titles available at Stanford. SearchWorks also includes links to online versions of journals and holdings information that shows what volumes and years are available for a title. SearchWorks does not contain details about individual journal articles. Search databases to locate journal articles.

Title abbreviations: you can search for a title by its abbreviation (e.g. J Am Chem Soc) as a title keyword search. Embedded terms are also retrieved in the title keyword field (e.g. chem. will retrieve biochem as well as chem.).

Short, common titles: a great way to find journals that have short, common names (e.g. Science, Nature) is to search for them by publisher instead of their title. For example, search AAAS and Nature as the name of the publisher to locate Science and Nature, respectively.

Advanced Search page: allows you to specify if a term is a partial word, exact word, or exact phrase. You can also specify if term is at the beginning of a phrase or anywhere in a phrase. You are also able to search multiple fields at a time (e.g. title and publisher) and to limit search results by a subject category.

Viewing eJournal articles While many users prefer to print PDF versions of articles, the web version may contain abstract/full-text links for cited references as well as links to high-resolution images, multimedia, and supplemental data. Different readers may be required to view articles. Unfortunately, errata are frequently not linked to articles (see Errata for online journal articles in the physical sciences: an empirical study (pdf)).

Features journal title abbreviations from early chemical literature and other historical reference sources that may not be listed in the CASSI Search Tool. Many thanks to Marion Peters, UCLA Librarian Emeritus, for compiling this list!

Evaluating journals

Provides easy access to data that helps you evaluate and compare scholarly journals. JCR can show you the highest impact journals, most frequently used journals, hottest journals, and largest journals. Search by journal title, publisher, subject category, or country.

Identify new journals, referred titles, and online titles in your discipline. Learn which databases or indexes to search for locating article level information in a journal.

Full-text searching

Most publishers now offer full-text searching for their journals. Deciding where to search, a publisher site or an index, is a key decision that impacts what is retrieved. Article level information on publisher sites is “invisible” to web search engines (e.g. Google). Below are some advantages and disadvantages of doing a full-text search for a journal on a publisher’s web site.

Advantages:

No lag time between time of publication and when article can be searched

Ability to search entire contents of an issue, not just research articles

Ability to search the entire text of an article by keyword (helpful for finding information about laboratory methods)

Helps provide quality control (e.g. all articles are refereed)

Efficient method to verify a citation

No search fees

Disadvantages:

Possible to miss relevant research without searching multiple sites

Key word searching can lead to overwhelming results

Inconsistent data (e.g. author names) may make it difficult to find all relevant articles

Potential gaps in coverage (early years may not be included)

Links to an extensive list of chemistry ejournals is being maintained by the Jonathan Goodman's Group at Cambridge University.

Titles indexed in a database

Knowing how many titles and what titles are covered in a database is a key factor in deciding which database to search. Knowing the lag time between when an article is published and when it is indexed is also important. In part, this is determined by how often a database is updated. Being aware of which databases index the contents of a journal cover-to-cover is also useful as some databases only index research papers.

Below are links to journal titles covered in selected databases. To search any of these databases, please go to the SUL databases page. Note that access to most databases is restricted to current students, faculty, and staff at Stanford.

Chemical abstracts service source index (online and print) CAS Source Index (CASSI) has a complete list of all print titles indexed in Chemical Abstracts. The latest version of the data is available on the web via the CASSI Search Tool A print copy of CASSI is also available in the Science Library. Please also see Beyond CASSI which features journal title abbreviations from early chemical literature and other historical reference sources that may not be listed in the CASSI Search Tool.